It's not every day you get a proper new title in the SimCity series. In fact, it's been a bit over ten years since SimCity 4 last showed us what it was like to control the fate of a vast metropolis (Socities and Sim City Socialnotwithstanding). So it's fair to say that our expectations were high as we sat down with final release code for the new game, which launches in the US tomorrow. Even without access to the full global servers, which EA hasn't turned on yet, we were excited to try promised new features like undulating curved roads, government buildings with snap-on expansions, and a regional commodity system that lets you buy and sell excess resources.

After spending around a dozen hours each playing the game this weekend, Microsoft Editor Peter Bright (who considers himself a bit of a SimCity die-hard) and I (Gaming Editor Kyle Orland) were pretty disappointed with what we found. What follows are edited excerpts from the various conversations we had over instant messaging this weekend, discussing how we were finding our initial time with the game. We'll have a more detailed review later when we've had a chance to try out the final release, complete with all the globally connected, Internet-enabled features EA has been playing up, but just going by first impressions, maybe EA shouldn't have messed with its successful city building formula quite so much.

Curved roads and crippling size limits

Peter: You know, it's dumb. I have wanted curved roads for so long, but I’m only building grids, because space is so tight. Grids are more efficient.

Kyle: I build curvy roads. They make the city look more natural, and I'm not that concerned about just min-maxing.

Peter: Well the thing is, I want clean, well-educated cities, and that is expensive.

Kyle: That said, I have 35,000 residents and I’m almost out of space, so they are really inefficient. Then again, I also have a ton of ridges and plateaus that use up my limited space, and I don’t see any way to flatten them. For my second city I built a grid core with parallel curves coming out, like a rainbow pattern. It looks great and is pretty efficient.

Peter: I love curvy roads in theory. If I had a SimCity 4-size city I would use curvy roads. There simply isn't enough space to have fancy curvy roads. I find it super frustrating. I have the tools to build the kind of city I would like, but I'm so pushed for space I just can't afford to. I'm so pushed for space already.

Kyle: Yeah, the space limits are way too tight. You reach the limit much too quickly. It always felt like it took longer when I use to play SimCity 2000. Maybe I was just younger.

Peter:SC2000 was way bigger. I'm honestly finding the size crippling. The small size means I can't regenerate one area funded by other areas, because anything short of a full city leaves me cash deprived.

Kyle: It makes very little sense, too. I mean they are already modeling the area outside that dotted white line that’s your square city limits. I can see that empty, lightly forested land. Just let me build on it! I'm guessing it’d be too hard for them to do that detailed, low-level modeling of every citizen and bus and fire truck and such, computationally, if they allowed for bigger cities.

Peter: That's my assumption.

Kyle: But even then, they could let me build a separate suburb that’s immediately adjacent and continue my city by connecting them together with a road. That'd be better than this “regional” crap that separates cities by miles of emptiness, never to be developed.

Kyle:(Later) I've reached a functional limit around 200,000 people. I have no more space.

Peter: Yep. Basically as soon as I hit 200K it starts going to shit. Which is weird, because SC2000 maxed out around 20 million, I think. SimCity 4 could have 8 million in a perfectly tuned city.

Kyle: Also, would it kill them to have subways? Streetcars are nice, but...

Peter: Or anything that allows transport without taking up gobs of space on the surface.

Kyle: Yeah, next time I am building no streets, because avenues are just tons better.

Peter: Yep. I find it very disappointing.

Kyle: No mixed use zoning, either.

Peter: Not enough transport options. No mixed zoning. Curved roads that I end up not using because I don't have space.

Kyle: I managed to have curved roads and 200K people. So I think you're being too stringent on that.

Peter: Well, I want to hit 290K, to max out my town hall.

Kyle: I want to EXPAND CITY LIMITS. Sigh.

Enlarge/ Watching those happy faces go up when you do things like placing parks is pretty addictive.

Simulation/Interface issues

Peter: My industry is complaining that it has nowhere to send goods, and I have no idea why. I have a depot that should let it sell freight to the region, but it doesn't seem to be filling up.

Kyle: I am getting constant complaints about not enough medium-income residents to fill jobs. No matter how much residential I zone in medium-cost areas, it never seems to be enough.

Peter: They seem hypersensitive about crime, even though I have practically a cop car on every block.

Kyle: Yes! One crime per week, and I’m still getting constant alerts that “crime has the upper hand.”

Peter: Zero crimes committed per day = "Crime has the upper hand." I don’t get it.

Peter: I'm being destroyed by traffic even with street cars and buses, and there's nowhere to go from the streetcar avenue. I want to build a tunneled highway or something, but there are no real transport options. Also, I'd like to extend the freeway right into my city, have a highway backbone so that industry can easily get goods out of the city.

Kyle: I had the game complaining at one point that I should connect to the highway. I was like, "Um, I already did that at the start in the only point I'm allowed to."

Peter: It’d also be nice to have multiple connections instead of one train track and one highway.

Kyle: Yeah, why can't I build more highways through town? Plenty of cities have highways in the middle of them, not just friendly avenues.

Peter: I didn't realize the importance of sticking big wide roads on the highway connection.

Kyle: There seems like very little reason to use small roads at all, except very early.

Peter: Because upgrading is so destructive. if you have to tear down a street to build an avenue, you lose the buildings on both sides.

Kyle: Yeah, paid buildings should stay if you’re just upgrading a road, that's a bit silly.

Peter: I want to be able to hide buildings when laying things out, like streets and zoning.

Kyle: I didn't find it that bad. It tells you when there's gonna be overlap, and looking from overhead makes it easy to see where things go.

Peter: It's for plopping down things like police stations. I want to be able to easily see where I have them.

Kyle: Go to the crime map. You'll see the police stations.

Peter: No, I know, but there's so much clutter, because you also get an icon for every police car that's out on patrol, so I get a huge mess of icons.

Kyle: The stationary ones with the big icons are the stations... I didn't find it to be confusing.

Peter: Maybe I have more police cars. I must have 40 driving around, if not more.

Kyle: I don't have that many yet.

Enlarge/ The skyline view of my city, with Peter's visible over the river in the background.

Peter: So it's complaining that some buildings don't have water, even though I have an excess. It just doesn't seem to notice that I fixed my water shortage.

Kyle: Yeah, the game seems pretty slow to respond to fixes to problems sometimes.

Peter: I just don't get it. I have 66 kgal/hr excess water, but half my city is still complaining of shortages.

Kyle: Also, I have a sewage plant that periodically warns me that it’s full, then it gets fixed without my intervention seconds later. Is it a problem or not, game? Make up your mind.

Peter: Fuck. People are abandoning my city. I got hit by a meteor. It burned down a ton of buildings. Now it's all fucked. Game over man. Game over.
WTF, a zombie attack. How the fuck do I solve that? My population just got halved by a fucking zombie attack.
And because there's no save games, I can't go back in time to try a different route. There's no freedom to experiment. Because you suffer permadeath.

Peter: I really don't know about this game. Older SimCities, I always felt that there was something I could be doing. Tuning traffic, urban renewal, reducing pollution. This one I'm just not sure.
I'm having wild and crippling fluctuations in income. I can't determine the cause. From a net gain of 7K an hour it'll drop over the space of an hour or two to a loss of 5K an hour, so I'm spending all my time just trying to cope with that. It's stopping me from building up any serious cash reserves.

Kyle: It seems to bounce up and down a lot. Because pretty much anything you build besides roads comes with a regular per-hour cost. And the benefits come a little later, through higher land values and such.

Peter: Right, but what I don't get is why the fluctuations are happening. In the old SimCity, I could bring up a graph of income and expenses over time so I could at least easily tell if it's income going down or expenses going up. As far as I can tell, there are no graphs at all, except the population graph (if you click on the population number).

Kyle: It seems like the income bounces around a lot as businesses/residences go out of business and/or upgrade to bigger buildings. While they are constructing those new buildings, no taxes come in.

Peter: Yeah, but I don't know why they're doing it so periodically.

Kyle: One big building doing that renewal cycle has a huge temporary effect. They could smooth that out. I’m pretty sure the construction companies could pay taxes on the land, for instance.

Peter: Damn. My schools are overfull. So now my nuclear power plant is being run by morons. Which means it might blow up. Shit. Melted down.
Fucking hell, it's going to blow up again.
I don't understand. They have stopped enrolling in high school. So my education level is falling. So my nuclear power station keeps blowing up. But nothing is telling me WHY they're not enrolled at school. I have plenty of school buses. Well placed bus stops.
Man. Once things start going wrong, they go seriously wrong.

Kyle:(Later) Did you ever figure out why people stopped enrolling in high school, thereby blowing up your nuke plant?

Peter: I think, but may not be sure, that to keep the nuke plant safe you need a community college or university. I have one city with the CC, one the university. Both are keeping the workers at the "safe" rating. Grade schools didn't seem good enough.

Kyle: That kind of makes sense.

Peter: Yes, but it would have been nice for it to tell me that explicitly before irradiating my city.

Kyle: Sure.

Peter: Plus, SimCity 4 showed an over-the-top explosion to signify a meltdown. This time, I just got an advisor pop-up explaining the situation and no steam from the cooling tower.

Kyle: In general the game is good about alerting you when there's a problem and what precisely needs fixing.

Peter: Oh, I disagree. In theory, if an advisor has something to tell you, the button in the toolbar goes yellow or red, depending on the severity. Several times I've had buildings lose water (even though I have plenty of water), and the button didn't change color. But when I switched to the tool for unrelated reasons, all of a sudden red tap icons would appear on buildings and the advisor would complain.

Kyle: Huh. I haven’t noticed that.

Peter: Of course I had no idea what to do to fix it, since there was plenty of water. I feel it's more "bug" than "by design."

Enlarge/ My quickly depleting water table. Apparently if I placed my water pumps on the shore line this wouldn't have happened...

Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl

441 Reader Comments

Sounds like an incredibly realistic game to me: Pointless bureaucratic money grubbing keeps you from doing what is a plainly obvious good, citizens are never satisfied, things break for no reason, and you never have enough money. Pretty much a perfectly accurate depiction of American municipal government.

The city size limits and lack of subway aren't all that surprising when I think about it. I'd be willing to bet that EA is planning an expansion to add these "awesome new features" (probably a month after release for $15).

Yep. Call this confirmation bias, but I'm not picking this one up tomorrow. One, I'll wait until the bugs are ironed out. Two, anemic city sizes and the inability to play if my internet isn't at full hum.

Don't worry, being EA, they're bound to try and nickle-and-dime the game to death, and increased breathing space will be a real money transaction.

I loved the Simcity games to bits, Simcity 2k was probably my favourite. I really would like a modern version, but I am damned if I am paying through the nose for a "microtransactions" online-only version. Hell, I am trying to avoid EA titles in general these days, but eeesh...

So this is something I think about quite a bit: if we all hate this, can’t truss it, won’t leave it alone with our daughters, I would be very curious to know who is playing these games. Are we saying one thing, and doing another? Because this is a non-zero figure, people.

I cancelled my pre-order. What I loved about the previous SimCities was the scale involved, and it appears that they lowered the scale too much. As the article states, I do want to build my own version of New York City, Los Angeles, etc.

I had seriously been considering holding my nose at the always online, etc. and trying out the new SimCity. This preview has convinced me to give is a pass. I personally love the idea of having actual individuals populate your city and all that, but combining that with always-online/social, and it looks like they had to develop for the lowest common denominator PC, instead of letting people with powerhouse machines have gigantic cities with lots and lots of people.

Wow, this looks really disappointing. The city size limit is completely unrealistic, and forces an unnatural "squareness" to the cities, at least from what I can glean from the photos. SC4 was great in allowing structures to sort of taper off as they flowed into the outskirts of the city. Couple that with the inability to save? No thanks. Sometimes it was fun to inflict some destruction on your vast city, but only on the condition that you wouldn't save.

Too bad really, because I do like the idea of seeing friend's cities in the background, and the ability to watch the more in depth "lives" of your citizens daily routines.

Sim people complaining about crime rates in the game is nothing new. In the original Sim City, I would often get bored with vanilla gameplay and would set my firefighting budget to zero before setting off multiple fires in the industrial quarters, devastating my city in no time. Even with one third of the city ablaze and another third smoldering ashes, I would have 40% complaints about crime and 30% complaints about traffic.

Then again, the traffic complaint somewhat makes sense as the smarter sims were doubtlessly fleeing the horror of my post-apocalyptic masterpiece only to find most the roads destroyed.

This looks so disappointing. Those city sizes are ridiculously small--Sim City 2000 was about 10x larger. This looks more like a glorified The Sims than the Sim City game I wanted. All those resources modeling Sims should have been spent modeling large cities. Sim City should be all about the cities!

I never played Sim City 4 (2000 was the last one I played way back in the day). I think instead of picking this game up I might finally play Sim City 4 instead.

I played it for 3.5 hours the other night during the closed beta. I got it up to about 35,000 people before time was up. I'm sure I could do better next time, towards the end I realized my town hall addition build order was messed up (utilities first, then education).

My gripes, other than small city size, are as follows...

1) No subways, no freight rail stations. 2) Inter-city interactions seem awkward (how do I lend stuff to other cities again?)3) Bugs in things like water distribution (university complains about lack of water, fix was to put in water tower next door, even though I was showing surplus).

I don't plan on buying the game until May simply because I wouldn't have time with school to play it, and I'm waiting for the Mac version anyways (since SC4 never worked right on Intel Macs anyways).

Polygon reviewed this so well, and you guys trashed it. I am conflicted My hope is that they will increase the city size- that seems to be the one universal flaw everyone is finding with it, aside from the always-online-ness of it, which cant be fixed. I have both SC4 and the new one, so even if I decide the cities are too small or buggy right now, I will go back to SC4 until they get it fixed.

the depth of the simulation seems to have whiffed right by your heads.

I get that it's deep. For example, every sim has money. If a tourist comes to your city and can't spend all his money at once, he stays the night in a hotel. That's really interesting--but what does it actually add to the gameplay? More specifically: how is it better than a probabilistic simulator, where X% of tourists stay the night. Why do we need simulation on the individual level of the citizen?

There are things that it does make sense to have simulated individually, such as fire trucks and police cars. But they were essentially simulated individually in SC4 anyway.

What's worse is that aspects of the simulator that were weak in past games--in particular, pathfinding--remain weak in this one. So you're left with a bunch of individually simulated citizens each using the same dumb pathfinder.